Big brands like Apple are very successful at using great storytelling as a medium. It's not just about selling their products, it's about creating emotional engagement. This is an approach that not many of their competitors have considered or used. Given the success of their formulas, at Quo Agency, we have practiced replicating different product pages from Apple to expand our knowledge and grow our repository. Nayeli, Daniela, and Sebastian are our young interns and part of the Webflow team responsible for the Apple Products "Petri" Creation Project.
Transforming non-developers into Apple-level website creators with Webflow training
This year, Diego, one of Quo´s web developers and designers, started training the youngest members of our team to work with Webflow. "In less than three months, Nayeli, Daniela and Sebastian were able to create websites like those of Apple products", Diego said during a conversation on the first episode of our podcast. It is important to mention that these members had no prior knowledge of information technologies and the required language, so they are non-developers and non-designers. Diego added, "So far, they have delivered excellent results."
Pushing limits and learning from the process. Learning to manage complex apps can be indeed achieved.
At the very beginning, Diego felt that the biggest challenge was working with interns who only had basic computer skills. However, as the training process progressed, he found that they learned very quickly. "Imagine what they can do in five years or even one year from now,'' he said enthusiastically. The first page to be replicated was the Mac Mini landing page. Nayeli, one of our young interns, created the interface based on what we can see on an Apple page, with no animations and no interactions, this way marking the first production stage of the first set of iterations and landing pages. It is important to add that she has done a great job so far. "A technical part of the project is to try to get better at achieving what big-budget brands as Apple do", Diego commented during the podcast.
Pushing what Webflow can do with native interactions
Although Webflow is a wonderful tool for creating HTML interfaces and some animations, it is indeed a limited tool. That's the main reason this project is also about pushing the limits of what Webflow can do. Diego believes it is important to get as close as possible to what Apple can achieve just by using Webflow's native features. As an example, one challenge for the interns while working with Webflow was the way it behaves with different screen sizes and different pixels. Right now, the team of interns is working to take things a step further by adding interactions like scrolling and moving around the page. "We are still learning a lot from our training program and hope to train more people in the future," Diego commented. Also, one of the positive outcomes of this project is that the interns are currently working with a real customer; the first of many more, hopefully. "Internally, we are still learning and improving," Diego asserted.
A bright future: a repository of Apple landing pages
What is the plan for the future? The plan is to create a repository of landing pages. "Apple is such a popular brand that we expect to gain more visibility through this repository of pages," Diego stated.
Finally, another plan is to involve more interns in these types of projects. In this way, Quo Agency helps them access new job markets that would otherwise not be available to them.
To learn more about this project, check out the first episode of our podcast titled Apple products "Petri" creation projects on our YouTube channel, Quo Agency Inc.